Saskia Burggraaf

Saskia Burggraaf makes video (-installation), performances and drawings. Or whatever suits her concept.She is searching for 'the alternative' in society and is interested in the social rules or conventions in mass culture and the influence they have on the individual within capitalist repression. While looking at how 'the alternative' reacts to those conventions and observes how they work, Saskia also looks at how these conventions influence my own art practice. Playing with what is seen as cultural elements, integrating into the so-called alternative, the alternative mixing with popular culture. From squatting and it's autonomous communities, the wild spaces to the performative language, sound and queer bodies. The element of failure becomes a future prospect.

Saskia Burggraaf applies feminist, queer- and decolonization theory upon these alternative spaces ;  spaces that are created by the failure of society and apply different rules on social standards. These spaces are not neutral, or untouched, they are just as well infiltrated with the patriarchal structures of the society outside of that space.

Exhausted.

"Are conventions changeable by counter action? What does counter action actually mean within these borderland spaces and from which position comes the action? What do these multiverse realities do within who's society? How do my body interfere by questioning the idea of linear time?

Are these alternative places also influenced by it's surroundings and the other way around? By researching these unwritten rules and who made them, I am approaching 'the artist' as a role that can be staged or played and can be stepped in and out of with performative actions. My practice consists of different media, the form will follow the concept. Performances and installations are often centered around the manipulation of video material and sound to explore the antifascist dance floor and non-linear time (travel)."

Burggraaf has a research-collaboration with Anne Mul.  Their current collaborative project aims to explore and counter ways in which colonial practices (the operationalization of logics of imperialism) emerge and are reproduced in different spaces. This collaboration has bloomed from an interdisciplinary queer-feminist rhizome with the aim to imagine other futures.

Saskia Burggraaf works primarily in Haarlem and The Hague and is part of The Holls Collective."

Learn more about Saskia burggraaf's 20 minute presentation Vagal Tone Resonance: Disrupting timelines of inadequate monuments and ruins for future profit for the AEROPONIC ACTS 2020 at Radio Kootwijk, August 2020. 

Learn more about Saskia Burggraaf's written MA thesis (DAI, 2020): Making Worlds: Feminist Theory in Activist Performance for Inclusive Belonging: How to make space when you take space within urban squatter movements

Follow Saskia's "Life after DAI" via her website